X Spotted the Mark

In keeping with the season, the Tour make one last foray into the eXtremely eXciting world of Doctor Who Production Coding.  Is this just another way to eXamine an otherwise oddball miX of stories?  EXactly.

To Re-cap the classic series used codes for each story which started with A (for An Unearthly Child) and ran to 7Q (Ghost Light).  ‘I’ was never used, ‘O’ and ‘U’ sparingly, but as for the rest… And the Tour followed, even extended this into nu-Who all the way forward to Whittaker.

X	The Ark
XX	The Seeds of Death
XXX	Death to the Daleks
4X	Image of the Fendahl
5X	The Visitation
6X	The Mark of the Rani
8X	The Satan Pit
9X	The Doctor’s Daughter
10X	The Pandorica Opens
11X	The Rings of Akhaten
12X	Before the Flood
13X	The Woman Who Fell to Earth
14X	Village of the Angels

Previous stops in this ramshackle series included stops at ‘B‘ and ‘R‘ and now the laws of consonant-al shift move to ‘X.’  The first stop The Ark is a unique pair of linked 2-parters, one of the storytelling experiments Doctor Who could afford when seasons were 40+ episodes a year, Death to the Daleks was as dull as dishwater, but Image of the Fendahl was the last gasp of the gothic Hinchcliffe/Holmes run.  The Mark of the Rani introduced the Rani, The Woman Who Fell to Earth introduced Jodie Whittaker, and The Satan Pit put the hell in hell-o.

As for the eXceptional, we would argue for Image of the Fendahl, The Pandorica Opens, and especially the very recent Village of the Angels. 

Pretty good company wouldn’t you say?